Your Right to Know

BRUSSELS — The European Union is threatening to suspend two agreements granting the United
States access to European financial and travel data unless Washington shows it is respecting EU
rules on data privacy, EU officials said yesterday.

The threat reflects European disquiet about allegations that the United States has engaged in
widespread eavesdropping on European Internet users as well as spying on the EU.

Meanwhile yesterday, WikiLeaks said that the man who leaked information on the National Security
Agency’s surveillance program, Edward Snowden, has sent out appeals for asylum to six more
countries.

Snowden remains trapped in a diplomatic no-man’s land at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, lacking
documents that would allow him to enter Russia or travel to a country willing to damage relations
with Washington to give him refuge. Venezuela and Nicaragua offered Snowden asylum yesterday, but
how he could get to either country is unclear.

The 30-year-old former contract worker for the NSA has been on the run for more than a month
since telling journalists about massive U.S. efforts to track telephone conversations and Internet
traffic around the world.

Snowden lost what was probably his best shot on Thursday, when minor parties in Iceland’s
parliament proposed granting him immediate citizenship. That would have allowed him to evade
extradition to the United States for prosecution on espionage charges.

But the proposal by the liberal parties fizzled, with only six of the parliament’s 63 members
expressing support, the Russia Today network reported. The legislature then recessed for the
summer.

Before yesterday’s announcement, WikiLeaks had said that Snowden had appealed to 21 countries
for political asylum.

Bolivia threatened to close its U.S. Embassy as presidents from across the region met to show
solidarity with President Evo Morales after the global manhunt for Snowden diverted his flight.

“We don’t need them; we’ve got other allies,” Morales, 53, said Thursday at an emergency summit
of Latin American leaders in the highland Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

Presidents from Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela met with Morales to demand
that Spain, France, Portugal and Italy apologize and explain why they denied the Bolivian leader’s
presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on Tuesday.

The group called for a new meeting of South American presidents on Friday in Montevideo,
Uruguay, to discuss further retaliation against the European countries.

In Brussels, Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU’s home-affairs commissioner, wrote to two senior U.S.
officials on Thursday to voice European concerns about implementation of the two data agreements,
both struck in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack and regarded by Washington as important tools
in the fight against terrorism.

EU-U.S. relations are going through a “delicate moment,” she wrote in the letter to U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and David Cohen, treasury undersecretary for terrorism
and financial intelligence.

“Mutual trust and confidence have been seriously eroded and I expect the U.S. to do all that it
can to restore them,” she said in the letter.

Malmstrom is sending a team of officials to Washington next week for previously scheduled
reviews of both information-sharing agreements.

Information from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times was included in this story.